THAT was a waste of time. True, I was astounded again at Tyler's ability to make absolutely quotidian duty sound thrilling, but 60 pages from the end, it never broached its alleged topic and never would. Hitchcock famously said that if you show a bomb in the first scene, it has to go off by the end, but I really already knew that Tyler would never drop real bombshells, generally just trying to clean up badly untidy lives.

I bought it on a whim because I was expecting more insights into how a relationship might develop after death. Tyler seems to be getting older faster than I am or Baltimore is more staid than I could ever imagine, so this later book seems shorter than her others, with Tyler expressing more impatience with excessive self-reliance, mocked doubly so in brief descriptions of people who pay vanity presses to publish outrageous autobiographies. By the end I was wishing I'd read one of those self-published purple monsters, because, soothing as Tyler once seemed to an impatient soul, I'd rather refocus my interests on something, well, interesting, instead of buying her thoroughly furnished mind wholesale. In proper middling spirit, the book should be 3 stars, but am also deducting a star for bowing to the editor and starting another middle class lovein with a ghost you almost never really see.